Women's Third Job Audit
SECTION 1: WOMEN'S THIRD JOB EXPLAINED
Women don't have two jobs. They have three.
A friend of mine said something one evening that stopped me mid flow.
Her 16 year old daughter was meant to be revising for a test but instead was doubled over with period pain, changing bloodied bed sheets, all while calculating the familiar maths of female survival:
"If I get up an hour early, I can wash and dry my hair, put on make up (because all the other girls do), shave my legs (God forbid), and still have time to pack a "healthy" lunch (watch the waistline)."
My friend looked at her and said, with weary tenderness:
"Living in a female body is a full-time job."
She wasn't being dramatic. She was being accurate.
For decades we've had reasonably good language for women's first two jobs:
1. Unpaid work inside the home
2. Paid work outside the home
In the 1980s, sociologist Arlie Hochschild famously described women's "second shift": women doing a day's paid labour and then moving straight into a further shift of unpaid domestic work, rooted in the expectation of women as society's primary caregivers.
But there is another form of labour that rarely makes it into the conversation. My research terms this Women's Third Job — the work of living in a female body.
I divide this labour into four categories which I discuss in detail in my
book:
1. Biology
2. Beauty
3. Safety
4. Sex
This is the labour created by our sexed bodies and by the expectations placed on those bodies. It isn't a single task. It is a whole ecosystem of time, money, vigilance, planning, identity management and emotional labour.
Each one creates work — not only practical work, but also identity work (managing who you are allowed to be) and emotional labour (managing how other people feel about it).
Note that none of this labour shows up in a job description or GDP statistics. But it shapes women's time, energy and and opportunities every day.
And once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere.
This short audit will help you see where your workload actually sits across these three areas. It takes about 3–5 minutes. Don’t overthink it — just go with your instinct.
